Tech

At this point, people who follow cinema know to manage their expectations when anyone prominent claims they’re leaving the film industry. Steven Soderbergh said he was retiring from filmmaking back in 2013, but he returned to the big screen for 2017’s heist film Logan Lucky, he’s stayed active in television with The Knick and Mosaic, and now he’s back with the horror movie Unsane. It seems like all he needs to draw him out of retirement is some new piece of technology or filmmaking idea he wants to explore. With Unsane, that technology is… the iPhone.

In Unsane, a protagonist played by Claire Foy (The Crown, Wolf Hall) is dealing with a digital stalker who won’t leave her alone. Her attempts to get law enforcement involved somehow leads…

While the rest of you were crying into your cruelty-free glasses of vegan pond-water over the repeal of net neutrality, humanitarian and activist Rob Bliss was restoring freedom to American roads. Instead of allowing traffic to rely on government regulations and oversight, Bliss decided the street in front of the FCC building in Washington D.C. needed a fast lane. So he created one. Using his bicycle to ‘throttle’ a lane of traffic, he offered commuters the opportunity to pay a simple $5 fee to take advantage of the newly created “fast lane.” Bliss, like Ajit Pai, isn’t a professional engineer…

Last night, Axios broke the news that officials in the Trump administration were considering a fundamental rethinking of the US telecom industry. A proposal presented by a senior National Security Council official laid out a plan for aggressive federal intervention in 5G wireless technologies, with the federal government laying its own infrastructure to be leased to carriers. The White House is already distancing itself from the proposal, along with the FCC, but it’s noteworthy that the idea was circulating at all. It’s a bold, striking proposal that cuts against the last century of US telecom policy — and it would be wildly destructive if the White House ever did follow through on it.

Last night at the Grammys, only one woman accepted an award on stage during the three-plus hour live broadcast — Best New Artist winner Alessia Cara. Total, 11 awards out of 84 went to women. In the last six years, as The New York Times pointed out on Thursday, 899 people have been nominated for the awards, and 9 percent of them were women.

The hashtag #GrammysSoMale has been trending on Twitter for about 12 hours. In response, Recording Academy president Neil Portnow told Variety, “It has to begin with… women who have the creativity in their hearts and souls, who want to be musicians, who want to be engineers, producers, and want to be part of the industry on the executive level.”

Airbnb is offering a free, two-night stay aboard the research vessel Alucia, coupled with an underwater dive on a submarine. All you have to do in order to spend April 5th–7th out at sea off of Cape Eleuthera in the Bahamas, is enter and win a competition. Contestants have to submit a 50- to 550-character essay about “what you dream of exploring beneath the waves.”

On Saturday, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) announced that songwriters will get a pay raise from streaming services for the next five years, increasing their rate from 10.5 percent of revenue to 15.1 percent, a 43.8 percent increase. The shift, which is the largest increase in CRB history, came as a result of a dispute between the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) and the music streaming services run by Apple, Google, Spotify, Amazon, and Pandora.

The ruling also included a late fee for streaming services that don’t pay publishers and songwriters on time. “This is the best mechanical rate scenario for songwriters in U.S. history which is critically important as interactive streaming continues to dominate the market,” NMPA…

After seven years of planning and construction, Amazon’s mini rainforest spheres are finally opening in Seattle. “The Spheres,” as they’re known, hold 40,000 plants from 30 different countries around the world. They were designed as places employees can go to take a break or meet up with others away from their desks. The spheres also feature living walls, which are vertical gardens with over 25,000 plants woven into 4,000 square feet of mesh.

The structure is made of three connected spheres constructed from glass and steel, and, as reported by Bloomberg, they can accommodate up to 800 people. The biggest sphere is 90 feet high and 130 feet wide. Inside, it’s warm and humid, with temperatures sitting at an average of 72 degrees Fahrenheit…

Over the past few months, the internet has found a creepy new hobby: using artificial intelligence to paste the faces of celebrities onto porn videos. The technology has some disturbing implications, especially with regards to consent, harassment, and fake revenge porn. But on Reddit, where most of this content is being shared, users have found at least one wholesome (sort of) use for it: inserting Nicolas Cage into movies he never acted in.

Another day, another scam. A cryptocurrency startup called Prodeum – which promised to “revolutionise the fruit and vegetable industry” by putting it on the Ethereum blockchain – has seemingly pulled a good ol’ exit scam, leaving its duped ICO investors with one word only: “penis.” Things first started going awry over the weekend on January 28, when the company’s website suddenly went down. In place of the old layout, the page was showing only one thing: the word “penis” on a white background. The website continues to be unavailable at the time of writing. The startup, which claimed to be…

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